No Rental Cars

Joined
Jul 13, 2020
Messages
201
My company rents from Enterprise and National. Lately we have been frequently unable to get rental cars- they simply don’t have any. We were told that when Covid hit they sold most of their fleet to make up for the business shortfall and now that things are slowly opening back up they have more requests than cars. My son needs a car for grad school.....I’m interested to see what the prices and selections are at the dealerships.....we noticed the other night that at least one dealer was down probably 25% or so on his stock......
 
Try Turo if you're going to be renting a car. Otherwise I'd just hit the car sites like cargurus.com, cars.com, autotrader.com, etc. Just expand your search area, I usually do about a 500 mile radius, but last car I got happened to be about 200 miles away.
 
Have run into that a couple times lately … booking further in advance now.
Chevy Malibu a few days back was brand new … so Enterprise is buying …
 
All of the new car dealers locally are at 50% of the normal inventory... at best. One of the larger Ford dealers only has 6 new F-150's.

When I bought my 2017 Sierra last May, the dealer had 40-45 used pickups. Today they have 9.

I'll have to drive out to the airport and see what it looks like here. I'm curious now. The last time I was out there, maybe 3 weeks ago, they had a decent selection. About what I expected to see.

The next thing, is that the rental car companies will start running what they've got until the vehicles have around 50,000 miles on them like they did during the 2008-09 recession. I had a Camry that looked like it was used during the filming of "Escape from New York". It was dirty inside and out, it had mis-matched tires, the car was all scratched and dented, and a little short of 50,000 miles on the odometer. And I had zero choice as it was the last car that they had.
 
Have run into that a couple times lately … booking further in advance now.
Chevy Malibu a few days back was brand new … so Enterprise is buying …
I've made it my habit to rent at least 6 months in advance.

Currently there's a massive premium on rentals for June to September.
I have a rental in June for a full size for $480 for 9 consecutive days with Enterprise.
Currently they are going for $860 for the same period....it pays to pre-book!
 
My area has always had a low amount of rental cars available. If you do not have one reserved by Tuesday for the weekend you won't get one.

I have seen U-haul trucks rented instead of cars and even the home depot truck.
 
I just rented a car from Enterprise by me three weeks ago. They had at least ten vehicles on the lot to pick from. I will say it was a little thin from the normal amount of vehicles they usually have on hand.
 
I read an article about rental cars in Hawaii. Big shortage is causing big price increases. Like rentals starting at $600 per DAY in some cases.


And that's why I had to rent a truck from a construction equipment rental place.

Once tourism shut down all the rental cars were stored at Aloha Stadium:
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Today the lot is empty as the cars were shipped back to the mainland and as tourists slowly trickle into Hawaii cars are few and far between. Huge demand for so little available and now they are resorting to renting U-Hauls and other rideshare programs.
 
It's good to note that one of the arguments for EV ownership has been rental cars. That is, rent something if your EV is not up to the task. Such as towing a travel trailer or carrying your family on a long highway trip.

It has been my point all along that rental companies have traditionally been terrible at providing something more capable than a Nissan Altima. Now, it seems that just getting any rental at all, when you need it, takes an act of God. Hertz closes at 3PM at HPN (a NY airport). Not because they don't have flights, but because they don't have cars and they don't want to work.
 
Have run into that a couple times lately … booking further in advance now.
Chevy Malibu a few days back was brand new … so Enterprise is buying …
I heard that around 40% of their orders are cancelled so dunno how true that they are buying vehicles is. Hear there is lots of vehicles at different yard locations though to be shipped
 
I wanted to rent a minivan for 2 weeks in Florida in January but the cheapest we could find was $2000. A Tahoe/Suburban was over $4000. Ended up reserving a “Ford Edge or similar” for $800 and when I got to the counter they didn’t have an Edge-class vehicle so they offered me a RAV4 or a new Pacifica minivan for the same price. Lucked out on that one!
 
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